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Nora Reid believes scientific laws control everything, even love. With her grandparents’ epic first kiss story cemented in her brain, Nora develops a hypothesis she’s determined to prove:for each person in the world, there is exactly one other person, and at first kiss, they’ll experience an immediate and intense reaction.

But after four years of zero-reaction kisses, she comes up with a new theory: maybe that pesky crush on her stunningly hot best friend Eli Costas is skewing her results.

She needs to get rid of him, and fast.

Eli Costas is an injury-prone lacrosse star with a problem—the one chance he had at winning over the girl next door resulted in the most epically sucktastic first kiss ever. And now she’s…trying to get rid of him? Hell no. It’s time to disprove her theory and show her exactly what she’s missing. Game. On.

Disclaimer: This book contains a stunningly hot lacrosse player who isn’t above playing dirty to win over the stubborn girl-next-door of his dreams.

I love the friends-to-more trope. A romantic relationship built on friendship just seems so much more stable than one built on lust. Plus, there’s that whole ‘meant to be‘ aspect to it, with everyone around knowing that two people will end up together before they do. The First Kiss Hypothesis had all this, but it also did something different. Usually, this trope involves either neither character realising they like the other, or one character pining over the other while watching them go for other people until realising they liked their friend all along. While they didn’t know the extent of their feelings towards each other, both Eli and Nora admitted right from the start their attraction to each other, their crushes.

Which, as you can imagine, made this book super frustrating. In a good way. There was so much tension and back and forth and simply sweet moments between them, and I wanted to smash their heads together. I think a lot of characters in the book felt the same way. I wanted to grab Nora by the shoulders and shake her while telling her to give up on the hypothesis. I loved Eli’s counter-hypothesis, even if it was grabbing at straws. I love science, too, but Nora was way too attached to her idea, and there were flaws in her methodology. (Like basing the whole thing on one anecdote…)

While they weren’t perfect people, I actually really loved the adults in this. Ok, so Nora’s dad was clearly not the best, but her mom was trying to be a good mom while still being human. Eli’s dad was very much a dad. Nora’s grandmother? She was clearly a very sweet and important woman to both Eli and Nora, and her circumstances were a bit heartbreaking. Then there were the myriad of coaches and teachers and waitresses and so on that popped into the story to not only support the romances, but also support Nora and Eli with their futures.

Special mention goes to Ari (full name Aristotle??? Which is definitely fitting) who I adored. It was nice to see that he wasn’t portrayed as some sort of freak or treated any differently.

At around 250 pages, this was a quick read. I finished it in a day, partly due to length and partly due to being so eager to see Nora and Eli work things out. It was sweet and wonderfully frustrating and had touches of realness that grounded it. If the friends-to-more trope is your thing, then add this to your TBR!

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0: Couldn't finish1: Want my precious reading hours back2: Could have done without it3: It was good, but it's not an essential read4: Really liked it and glad I picked it up5: Absolutely loved it and would read again

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